Angela Carter Quotes

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?

We live and breathe words.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

A language is everything you do.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe" le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

Talking payes no toll.

I think that the development of any culture has something to do with the way people deal with the concept of illusion. The fact that the sound of my voice and the way I modulate it creates pictures in your head... in order for us to accumulate knowledge, we have to create symbolic exchanges that let ourselves be fooled temporarily by something that's not there - by a substitute for reality. When you talk about representation, you're talking about language.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.

The talking shows allow me to come out of my cave and that's why those shows go on for so long. I hate walking off stage. Sometimes I walk off and I miss them as I'm walking off the stage. I wonder if they'll let me go another hour. That's why I do it: to communicate, to get points across.